Liam Neeson plays a good-guy thief

 

   Predictable, preposterous, and typically dour, Honest Thief features Liam Neeson as a bank robber whose efforts at reform are thwarted by duplicitous FBI agents.

    These days, Neeson's presence often signals what's in store, and Honest Thief offers little by way of exception to the rule that casts Neeson as the individual who fights his own battles, sometimes to rescue a snatched loved one or, in this case, to save himself from evil FBI agents.

    Neeson plays Tom, a successful bank robber who, after eight years and 12 successful jobs, begins to crave normalcy. Tom's transformation begins when he meets this edition's stereotypical good woman. Annie (Kate Walsh) operates the storage facility in which Tom stashes his loot, some $9 million. 

    Tom, you see, is an unusual thief. He doesn't spend the money he steals. Moreover, he offers to give it all back in return for a light sentence, a couple of years in a Boston minimum security prison that’s close enough for Annie to visit.

    Of course, surrender isn't easy. A couple of devious FBI agents (Jai Courtney and Anthony Ramos) learn that Tom really is the so-called "In and Out Bandit" and decide to keep the money he has stolen.

  Courtney portrays Agent Nivens, the mastermind of the scheme to steal Tom's stash. As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that Nivens will do anything to keep the money. He's more of an amoral nut job than his partner in crime. Married with a family, Ramos' Agent Hall suffers pangs of conscience.

    Director Mark Williams leaves few genre bases untouched. Tom not only knows how to crack safes; he also knows something about bombs, knowledge he picked up as a Marine and which allows Tom to fulfill another genre requirement, setting off at least one major explosion.

    "Wow," says Annie as she watches Tom blow a house to smithereens.

    You'd think the writers could have come up with a line that at least employed a word with two syllables. 

   Even Neeson can't sell some of the dialogue, stuff about how the robberies weren't about the money but served as a means to make Tom feel alive. 

   Tom ultimately has to settle matters his way. How else? "I'm coming for you,'' he tells agent Nivens, a line that sounds as if it has been said a thousand times before.

    The actors give it their best and, at 98 minutes, Honest Thief doesn't overstay its welcome but action, violence and the always serious Neeson can't rescue this unremarkable and sometimes ludicrously plotted thriller.

A Kaiser in exile and a fraught love story

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany abdicated his throne in 1918, retreating to the Netherlands, where he lived in exile for another couple of decades. Adapted from the Kaiser's Last Kiss, a novel by Alan Judd, The Exception looks at the Kaiser's life during the heyday of the Third Reich, which the Kaiser evidently hated for its boorishness. A brilliant Christopher Plummer plays the Kaiser as a character reminiscent of a Tolstoy creation, an intelligent but mildly deluded ruler who never has accepted his fall from power. The story kicks off when the Nazis assign a German captain (Jai Courtney) to watch over the Kaiser and keep an eye out for spies. Courtney's Capt. Brandt evidently has been banished himself; he's on a punishment assignment for having gotten crosswise with the SS during a stint in Poland. The Kaiser surrounds himself with a small coterie of loyalists that includes a military aide (Ben Daniels) and the empress, a fine Janet McTeer. The story of a rueful monarch in exile is muddied by Capt. Brandt's infatuation with one of the kaiser's servants (Lily James). Director David Levaux focuses much of the movie on the relationship between the captain and the servant girl, a young woman who happens to be Jewish. Questions about the meaning of loyalty arise for the smitten Capt. Brandt, but the movie's emphasis on romance costs it some hard-edged credibility. Eddie Marsan appears briefly as Heinrich Himmler.

Another day, another 'Die Hard'

A strong-performing series seems to have lost most of its cleverness.

A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth movie in the Die Hard series that kicked off with style and high tension in 1988, suggests that Bruce Willis -- like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone -- won't surrender his action-movie cred without a fight -- in fact without lots of fights.

Throwing plausibility to the winds, A Good Day to Die Hard brings a steady spew of cartoonish violence to Russia, where Willis's John McClane joins his estranged son (Jai Courtney) in a battle to head off a possible terrorist threat -- or something like that.

Ripe with dimly written father/son banter, Willis's one-liners (a repeated assertion that he's on vacation, for example) fall flat, and when McClane finally gets around to his signature "Yippee Ki Yay" line, even Willis seems to have lost interest in trying to put some real punch into it.

Rather than develop a credible plot, director John Moore (Max Payne) invests his energy in a cascading series of action set pieces that are as notable for their noise as for the finesse with which they're executed. In Moore's hands, the action has the jarring blatancy of a car crash, which may be precisely what genre fans crave, particularly in an obvious piece of Valentine's Day counterprogramming.

Moore wastes little time getting started. As soon as McClane arrives in Moscow, he's involved in a clangorous chase sequence that hits the city with wrecking-ball force. And it's hardly surprising that before the movie's done, Moore has broken out enough artillery to arm several small countries.

The movie tries for a little emotion with a woeful father/son reconciliation that follows McLane's admission that an over-emphasis on work caused him to neglect his son's formative years. The neglect doesn't seem to have had much effect on Courtney's Jack McLane, a CIA agent who's referred to by his skeptical father as the "007 of Plainfield, N.J." Dad arrives in Russia hoping to find out what's going with his supposedly wayward son, and doesn't learn that Jack's in the CIA until the action is well underway.

Jack's mission: To smuggle a man named Kamarov (Sebastian Koch) out of the country, along with a secret file. The imprisoned Kamarov has been set-up by another Russian (Sergei Kolesnikov). Although the story boasts a few more twists, none of them come as much of a surprise.

Aside from a cameo appearance by Mary Elizabeth Winstead (as McClane's daughter), Yuliya Snigir, who plays Kamarov's daughter, provides the only other female presence.

A Good Day wrings most of the cleverness and suspense out of the series, substituting as much brashly stated action as it can find. The movie is all pulse and no smarts, the father/son theme falls flat and explosions serve as blaring punctuation marks in a story that eventually finds its way to the ruins of Chernobyl.

If I had to guess, I'd say that A Good Day to Die probably will out-perform Schwarzenegger's recent The Last Stand and Stallone's Bullet to the Head, and it does take a bit of twisted imagination to set some of the action in a place as ravaged as Chernobyl and make it worse.

But based on A Good Day to Die, I'd say it's past time for Willis to put McLane to rest. It's not only the weapons in A Good Die to Die Hard that fire automatically, so -- for the most part -- does this rampaging blur of a movie.